gripping shots in granda: how i survived a 32°c photo day
woke up to a ceiling fan spinning aimlessly in my guest room wondering if i’d forgotten to pack a sweatshirt. today’s high of 32°c felt like someone turned the heat up to absolute maximum. didn’t matter. my camera bag was already half-full of ruined rolls anyway. someone told me that the local market here in granda sells watermelons for $1 each. i didn’t buy one. i just walked past a vendor yelling about ‘fresh passionfruit’ and decided to take a photo instead.
the heat here is relentless. i’ll be out until the cows come home waiting for my lens to stop fogging up. yesterday i tried using that new uv filter i bought online but it’s basically a disco ball now. folks say it’s a scam. maybe they’re right. i heated a can of deodorant with the sun just to see if it’d work. it didn’t. just smelt like burnt aluminum. basically, i’m living my worst nightmare as a freelance photographer in this moment. the humidity’s got my hands sticky and my imagination is melting like a popsicle. wanted to take some portraits of these old brick walls but my batteries died at 3%. someone in the hostel warned me about the traffic. apparently there’s a law here where drivers don’t stop for pedestrians unless you’re carrying a suitcase. i ran into a car yesterday. not a big deal. i just yelled ‘paso!’ and ran faster. it’s granda. everyone knows that if you survive here, you get a free pass in life.
someone told me the tap water here tastes like regret. i showed it to a kid and he just laughed. said it’s magnesium. i laughed too. then drank it anyway. now my stomach’s staging a rebellion. but that’s the trade-off, right? these stories? these survival techniques? they get you better shots than any fancy lighting setup. speaking of shots-there’s this rumor floating around that the old theater downtown has ghost orbs. i heard that through a drunk guy at a bar who said something about a silver mirror and a disembodied guitar. maybe worth a try later. the view from there is supposedly epic. but guess what? i couldn’t even focus my lens properly last night because my face was sweating so much. classic.
wanted to photograph the sun setting over the canal. didn’t happen. there’s a policy here where the sun just… skips this town if it’s too hot. asked a local if they believed it. she just shrugged and handed me a bottle of vitamin water. said it was for my soul. 50 gems. i don’t even know what that is. turns out, it’s just light beer. who knew?
the thing about granda is that everything’s a bit of a scam unless you’re prepared to haggle. like that guy selling the camera lenses downtown. he first tried to rip me off with a complicated story about ‘import taxes’ and then changed his price after i pretended to understand him. so now i have a cheap lense that works 60% of the time. works fine for these kinds of low-budget shots. like last week when i tried to capture that street artist painting avana on a wall but half the photo was just a blur of his confused face. ah well. part of the charm.
if you get bored, managua is just a few hours away. or, you know, just lie in bed and wait for the sun to decide whether it wants to shine. link to tripadvisor for hotel in granda link to yelp for local coffee link to a forum about photography in central america
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